Originally posted by: Tasiin
I know. I'm half considering trying to order a CRT refurb from AccurateIt, though that would really depend on whether my return period was extended by getting the replacement NEC from Best Buy. If it wasn't, then I suppose this'll be my monitor for the next few years or so. That wouldn't be a terrible thing (or I never would have even considered keeping it earlier), but I still can't shake the feeling that I'm paying a lot of money to make quite a few compromises compared to my CRT. If it was extended, I'll probably end up ordering one to at least check it out and compare it to this, and I'll just send it back if it's not good.
After the first hour of working with the sharp text on this monitor, it became clear to me that I'll never go back to a CRT. Even a high quality aperture grille one just can't compete in this field.
It's a 15" LCD, so it has a rather startlingly high pixel pitch of .297mm according to the chart on this
AT article. Like I mentioned earlier, it has a pretty heavy anti-glare coating on it so it's a bit blurred out and the sand paper effect is definitely evident. My CRT had a .24mm dot pitch and I ran it at 1280x960 most of the time. I don't think CRTs can be directly compared to LCDs for this though, can they?
Indeed, they can't. On LCDs, the dot pitch is just an indication of the size of the displayed pixels in 1:1 (no scaling); it's not strictly a measure of actual pixel size, since there's space between them, but you get the idea. Choosing one is generally a matter of personal preference: some people like smaller pixels, some don't.
On CRTs, the dot pitch is a measure of how fine the physical raster of dots (mask, grille) actually is; the finer it is, the more accurately it can reproduce smaller details, including smaller pixels when you increase the resolution; so you'd want it to be as small as possible, as it doesn't influence the size of the pixels, but the accuracy with which they are reproduced.
What we want to compare here is the pixel size, so for the CRT you'd have to know the effective (usable) size of the screen, then do the division to figure out how large a pixel would be when displaying 1280x960.
I'm not sure what exactly it is about that's hurting my eyes, really. Maybe it's the sharpness -- both my other LCD and CRT are a bit blurred, and I think that's part of why I find them more comfortable.
Yeah, you seem to prefer larger, slightly blurred pixels. Well, I have a suggestion for you. It goes against all my personal preferences; actually, I'm having difficulty even getting... my... hands... to write... this... down... Try setting your screen size to 1440x900.
Phew, there, I can't believe I actually said it. This will give you a dot pitch of 0.3 mm, while preserving the aspect ratio of 16:10. The pixels should be a bit blurry as well. You'll lose some screen real estate, of course, but it may be worth a try.
White text against black backgrounds seems to be especially painful with the NEC. Not that that's a wonderful combination to begin with, but I can at least look at it for more than a few minutes on different monitors. Pages like
this are almost impossible for me to read on the NEC, but they were fine on my CRT and the other LCD, with the LCD being the easiest of the two. Perhaps I'm just unusually sensitive to it, but that
hurts on this monitor, regardless of the settings.
Ouch! Yeah, I agree. A bad choice for displaying text - that's white (255, 255, 255) on black (0, 0, 0); you generally don't do that - look at the command prompt in Windows, for example: yeah, it's white on black, but the 'white' is actually (192, 192, 192), which makes it easier on the eyes. I do think it's the contrast that makes it so painful. My NEC stays at 18.7% brightness and 77.1% contrast; I lowered the contrast to 0%, and the text became easier to read. But you do want that contrast when reading black text over a white or light gray background - I guess it's what our eyes and brains are used to.